Digital video capabilities can be incorporated into a wide range of displays, including digital televisions, personal digital assistants (PDAs), laptop computers, desktop monitors, digital cameras, digital recording devices, digital media players, video gaming devices, video game consoles, cellular or satellite radio telephones, video teleconferencing devices, and the like. Display links are used to connect displays to appropriate source devices. The bandwidth requirements of display links are proportional to the resolution of the displays, and thus, high-resolution displays require large bandwidth display links. Some display links do not have the bandwidth to support high resolution displays. Video compression can be used to reduce the bandwidth requirements such that lower bandwidth display links can be used to provide digital video to high resolution displays.
Others have tried to utilize image compression on the pixel data. However, such schemes are sometimes not visually lossless or can be difficult and expensive to implement in conventional display devices.
The Video Electronics Standards Association (VESA) has developed display stream compression (DSC) as a standard for display link video compression. The display link video compression technique, such as DSC, should provide, among other things, picture quality that is visually lossless (i.e., pictures having a level of quality such that users cannot tell the compression is active). The display link video compression technique should also provide a scheme that is easy and inexpensive to implement in real-time with conventional hardware.